|
Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
William Shakespeare
return to "Poetry" main-page
Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
from https://www.litcharts.com
“Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Summary
Should I compare you to a summer's day?
You are lovelier and more mild.
In May rough winds shake the delicate flower buds,
And the duration of summer is always too short.
Sometimes the Sun, the eye of heaven, is too hot,
And his golden face is often dimmed;
And beauty falls away from beautiful people,
Stripped by chance or nature's changing course.
But your eternal summer will not fade,
Nor will you lose possession of the beauty you own,
Nor will death be able to boast that you wander in his shade,
When you live in eternal lines, set apart from time.
As long as men breathe or have eyes to see,
As long as this sonnet lives, it will give life to you.
Sonnet 18 is essentially a love poem, though the object of its affection is not as straightforward as it may first seem. The speaker initially tries to find an appropriate metaphor to describe his beloved (traditionally believed to be a young man)—suggesting that he might be compared to a summer’s day, the sun, or “the darling buds of May.” Yet as the speaker searches for a metaphor that will adequately reflect his beloved’s beauty, he realizes that none will work because all imply inevitable decline and death. Where the first eight lines of the poem document the failure of poetry’s traditional resources to capture the young man’s beauty, the final six lines argue that the young man’s eternal beauty is best compared to the poem itself. In a strikingly circular motion, it is this very sonnet that both reflects and preserves the young man’s beauty. Sonnet 18 can thus be read as honoring not simply to the speaker’s beloved but also to the power of poetry itself, which, the speaker argues, is a means to eternal life.
The poem begins with the speaker suggesting a series of similes to describe the young man. In each case, he quickly lists reasons why the simile is inappropriate. For instance, if he compares the young man to a “summer’s day,” he has to admit that the metaphor fails to capture the young man’s full beauty: he’s more “lovely” and more “temperate.” As the poem proceeds, though, the speaker’s objections begin to shift. Instead of arguing that the young man’s beauty exceeds whatever he’s compared to, the speaker notes a dark underside to his own similes: they suggest impermanence and decay. To compare the young man to the summer implies that fall is coming. To compare him to the sun implies that night will arrive—and soon.
However, as the speaker notes in line 9, “thy eternal summer shall not fade.” The young man’s beauty is not subject to decay or change. Clichéd, natural metaphors fail to capture the permanence, the inalterability, of the young man’s beauty. To praise him, the poet needs to compare him to something that is itself eternal. For the speaker, that something is art. Like the young man’s “eternal summer,” the speaker’s lines (i.e., the lines of his poem) are similarly “eternal.” Unlike the summer or the sun, they will not change as time progresses. The speaker's lines are thus similar to the young man in a key respect: the poem itself manages to capture the everlasting quality of his beauty, something that the poem’s previous similes had failed to express.
If the speaker begins by suggesting that the poem is a good metaphor for the young man’s beauty, he quickly moves to a more ambitious assertion: the poem itself will give eternal life to the young man: “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” Here the poem’s argument becomes circular: the young man isn’t like a summer’s day or the sun because his beauty is eternal. But his eternal beauty is itself a property of the poem that praises him: his body is as fallible and mortal as anyone else’s. He attains a kind of permanence and immortality only because the poem praises him.
The speaker thus thinks that poems are eternal objects—that they do not change or alter as they encounter new readers or new historical contexts. He also thinks that poetry possesses a set of special, almost magical powers. It not only describes, it preserves. The poem is thus not simply a way of cataloguing the young man’s beauty, it propagates it for future generations.
The poem, then, ultimately asks its audience to reflect on the powers of poetry itself: the ways that it does and does not protect the young man against death, and the ways in which it preserves and creates beauty unmatched by the rest of the mortal world.
The first four lines of Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18" establish the broad concern of the poem and some of its stylistic features. The first line of the poem poses a rhetorical question: the speaker asks whether he should compare his beloved (addressed directly as "thee") to a summer's day. (Based on contextual clues in the surrounding poems, most scholars assume that the person addressed in this sonnet is a young man, possibly of higher social standing than the poet. Despite extensive analysis, there is no consensus about who this young man was). In posing this question, the speaker is playing on a Renaissance proverb: "as good as one shall see in a summer's day"—which means something like "as good as the best there is." The speaker is asking, in other words, whether it would be appropriate to compare the young man to something widely regarded as the best and most beautiful thing possible.
In the following three lines, the speaker offers a series of reasons why the comparison is inappropriate. His reasons are surprising—the young man is more beautiful than a summer's day. His beauty exceeds a proverbially perfect thing. The speaker offers a series of reasons why. He is more "lovely" and less extreme. In contrast to the heat of a summer's day, he is "temperate": mild and pleasant. The word "temperate" is particularly suggestive since it derives from the Latin word tempus—meaning a "period of time." The echo of the Latin word suggests an emerging concern in the poem with time itself and its effects: aging, decay, and death.
In the following two lines, Shakespeare notes that the summer is itself temporally limited. It emerges from spring and falls into winter. Thus the buds of beautiful flowers are shaken by "Rough winds," which remind one of the winter that has been and the winter to come. The perfection has a short lease: it endures only for a brief moment. This concern with time itself increasingly occupies the poem—and becomes its central challenge as the speaker searches for a metaphor or simile that does not imply that his beloved will decay and die.
Seasons
Seasons are units that divide up the year. In Western culture, the seasons unfold like a story: birth followed by maturity, maturity followed by decay and death. As such, the seasons are often used in poetry as metaphors for the progress of a human life from youth to old age. And, in a Christian context, the return of spring after the winter often serves to represent the possibility of resurrection.
"Sonnet 18" references this tradition at several key points in the poem. The poem opens by asking whether the speaker should compare the young man to a "summer's day." In line three, he refuses, implicitly, to compare the young man to the "darling buds of May." In line five, he returns to summer as a symbol—and again refuses it, this time on the grounds that summer doesn't last long enough to represent the young man's "eternal summer."
The poem thus has a strained relationship with the tradition of using the seasons as a symbol for human life. It invokes that tradition only to refuse it. Because the symbol implies narrative—change, transformation, aging, decay—the speaker finds it inappropriate for his purposes. This raises interesting interpretative questions: one might wonder, for instance, if the poem also rejects a Christian model of resurrection (which requires death) in favor of its own, poetic form of eternal life.
Symbol The Sun
The Sun
In Renaissance love poetry, the sun is often used as a symbol for physical or personal beauty. Because the sun is the source of all light—and life—comparing someone or something to the sun suggests that they are unusually, even exceptionally beautiful. Further because "sun" sounds a lot like "son" (in Renaissance English, the two words were regularly spelled in the same way), the sun often becomes a symbol of Christianity (in reference to the fact that Jesus is the son of God).
In "Sonnet 18," the speaker considers comparing the young man to the sun, but rejects the comparison, noting that the sun's beauty is often dimmed by clouds. (In other sonnets, the speaker does compare the young man to the sun—precisely because the sun's beauty is variable. See Sonnet 33, for example, where he refers to the young man as "my sun" and then complains, "he was but one hour mine, / The region cloud hath masked him from me now"). To reject this metaphor—to say that the young man is more beautiful than the sun because his beauty is more eternal—raises questions about the poem's relationship to Christianity. The speaker might suggest here that the young man's beauty and importance rival that of the divinity.
Alliteration
"Sonnet 18" contains a number of instances of alliteration. These plays of sound bind together Shakespeare's lines: for example, the repeated sh sound in "shall" "shade" in line 11. Shakespeare's alliterations often reinforce the content of the poem. For example, in line 8 the connected sounds of "chance " and "changing" underscore the impermanence of the natural world. And in line 14, "lives" and "life" underline the connection between the eternal life of the poem and the young man's eternal life.
Temperate Lease Complexion Fair Untrimmed Possession Ow'st
Temperate as used in line 2 means that the speaker's beloved is not susceptible to extremes. The word often carries moral undertones and is closely related to the word "temperance," which suggests moderation and self-control. Yet "temperate" can also refer to pleasant weather that is neither too hot nor too cold. Shakespeare latches onto the word's ability to reference both to emotionality and weather to underscore his beloved's mild, pleasing nature.
Form
"Sonnet 18" is a Shakespearean sonnet, meaning it has 14 lines written in iambic pentameter and that follow a regular rhyme scheme. This rhyme scheme can be divided into three quatrains followed by a couplet. Lines 1 through 12 follow and ABAB rhyme scheme—the first and third line of each four-line unit rhyme with each other, as do the second and fourth lines. In the final two lines, the rhyme scheme shifts: the two lines rhyme with each other.
These final two lines are the poem's volta or turn. In the volta of a sonnet, the poet often changes their mind, takes an opposing viewpoint, or complicates the argument the poem has so far made. The volta comes relatively late in a Shakespearean sonnet; in a Petrarchan sonnet, it falls at line nine. Because the Shakespearean sonnet was a new form in the 1590s, when Shakespeare likely wrote these poems, the Petrarchan sonnet sometimes haunts Shakespeare's writing. That's arguably the case here: the real change in the sonnet's perspective comes at line 9—where one would expect to find it in a Petrarchan sonnet. Instead of changing the argument of the previous 12 lines, the couplet of Sonnet 18 restates its argument. The sonnet is a thus a subtle hybrid between the two kinds of sonnets.
Meter
Shakespeare writes "Sonnet 18" in iambic pentameter—a meter he uses throughout his work, in both poetry and plays. Shakespeare uses the meter so often because it mimics the way people actually talk: unlike other meters, like trochaic tetrameter (the meter of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star"), iambic pentameter tends to fade into the background, a subtle rhythmic pulse that one notices only when it is disturbed by unnatural or unexpected metrical substitutions. An example of perfect iambic pentameter is seen here:
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
The poem does indulge in occasional metrical substitutions, yet these substitutions for the most part are smooth and do not significantly affect the way one reads the poem—either in terms of its rhythm or its content.
An exception occurs in line 3, which begins with a spondee—an unusual and disturbing variation:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
As a result, the line has six stresses instead of the usual five—a significant disturbance to the meter. In a poem concerned with time and decay, this metrical disturbance is thematically important. The rough winds trouble the perfection of summer; they also disturb the poem's own perfection, the rhythmic way it unfolds in time. The disturbance of the meter models the disturbance that the rough winds inflict on the "darling buds of May."
Rhyme Scheme
"Sonnet 18" observes the traditional rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet:
ABABCDCDEFEFGG
Note the way the rhymes divide the poem up. In the first 2 lines, Shakespeare introduces the separate rhymes of "day" and "temperate"; in lines 3 and 4, he completes those rhymes. The pattern continues throughout line 12. Each set of 4 lines is its own sonic unit. In the final couplet, however, the rhyme scheme shifts: Shakespeare introduces a rhyme in line 13 and then completes it immediately in line 14. The final lines are thus their own sonic unit. This reflects that this couplet brings closure to the poem and provides a sort of answer to the riddle posed by the prior lines—that is, to the question of how best to capture the beloved's immortal beauty.
The rhymes of the poem are not always exactly perfect, and Shakespeare does frequently rhyme single syllable words with multi-syllable words (for example "temperate" and "date"). However, the poem's strong meter keeps the reader from hearing this as a moment of syncopation or rhythmic disturbance: "temperate" and "short a date" are rhythmically equivalent. The poem also contains a few significant instances of internal rhyme: for example, the slant rhyme between "line" and "time" in line 12. This sonic similarity encourages the reader to think about the conceptual relationship between "lines" and "time." The poem's strong rhyme overall reinforce its sense of permanence: the poem is so well constructed that it must endure for eternity.
“Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Speaker
The speaker of "Sonnet 18" is a subject of considerable controversy. Many people read the poem as an autobiographical statement, part of an actual love affair that the historical Shakespeare had with a young aristocrat. (In the movie Shakespeare in Love, for example, Shakespeare writes the poem for his lover, the imaginary lady Viola de Lesseps—though contextual clues in the Sonnets suggest the poem was written for a man). There is no evidence in the poem itself, however, to support an autobiographical reading; indeed, we don't even know whether the speaker of this poem is a man or woman. We don't know how long the affair has been going on—or what class each partner belongs to. The speaker and the beloved remain anonymous and genderless throughout.
We can say that the speaker of this poem is fluent in the clichés of Renaissance love poetry, and thus highly literate. The reader doesn't learn much about the speaker from the poem, apart from the fact that he (or even perhaps she) is in love with someone very beautiful and that he believes his own poetry will help preserve the beloved's beauty for all of eternity.
“Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Setting
Though not explicit, the setting of "Sonnet 18" could be interpreted as being Renaissance London, where a passionate affair between the poet and his beloved has begun to unfold. Yet while the poem—and the relationship it describes—arise from the conventions of Renaissance English love poetry, the poem itself refuses to be located in a specific historical moment. It insists that a poem is an eternal and unchanging object, independent of the historical context in which it is produced—or in which it is read. Whether the poem succeeds in escaping its own historical and social context will thus be a major question for interpreting it.
Literary and Historical Context of “Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
"Sonnet 18" was most likely written during the 1590s. The form first entered English in the 1530s and 1540s when poets like Thomas Wyatt began translating Francesco Petrarch's poems. Over the intervening half-century, the sonnet became an increasingly popular form, particularly among the aristocracy, who used it to write about their illicit affairs and to find favor at court.
Shakespeare—who was a commoner—thus approaches the form with some skepticism, interrogating and reformulating its clichés, testing the sonnet to see if and how he might use it for his own purposes. For example, the traditional subject of the sonnet is unrequited heterosexual love: a male poet writes about an exalted and unattainable woman whom he adores with a fervor that borders on worship. Shakespeare introduces an important—if not unprecedented—twist to that tradition: the first 126 of his sonnets are addressed to a man. (For other homoerotic Renaissance sonnets, see Richard Barnfield's roughly contemporary sequence, "Certain Sonnets").
Shakespeare's sonnets have become some of the most widely read and popular poems in the English language—and Sonnet 18 remains perhaps the best known of Shakespeare's poems. In Shakespeare's own time, they seem to have been not particularly popular; they were largely forgotten until Edmund Malone's 1780 edition rekindled interest in them—in part by casting them as an autobiographical document. (Whether we should or should not read these poems autobiographically remains a subject of major debate among scholars.)
In the context of Shakespeare's Sonnets, "Sonnet 18" plays an important role. Literary scholars generally group the first 17 sonnets together. They're called the "procreation sonnets" because they urge the young man to reproduce as a way to preserve his beauty: "And nothing 'gainst time's scythe can make defence / Save breed to brave him when he takes the hence," Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 12. These sonnets consider the possibility that poetry might preserve the young man's beauty—and they reject that possibility. ("But wherefore do not you a mightier way / Make war upon this bloody tyrant time? / And fortify yourself in your decay / With means more blessed than my barren rhyme?" Shakespeare asks in Sonnet 16.) Sonnet 18 thus marks a major shift in the argument of Shakespeare's sequence: poetry replaces heterosexual reproduction as a way to preserve the young man's beauty. In doing so, it acquires a power and permanence that Shakespeare himself had denied it just two poems earlier.
Historical Context
Although there is continuing debate among scholars about when Shakespeare wrote his sonnets (some say it was as early as the 1580s; some say it was as late as the first decade of the 17th century), most agree that they were likely written in the early 1590s, possibly when the theaters were closed due to plague. Certainly by the mid-1590s, individual poems began to appear in compilations like The Passionate Pilgrim. This places the sonnets in the midst of what C.S. Lewis called "the golden age" of 16th century literature, in the same decade that Spenser and Sidney's major works first appeared in print—and that Shakespeare himself wrote some of his most important plays.
It also places the sonnets in a period of relative political calm. After years of conflict abroad, Elizabeth had defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588. Though she was aging—and did not have an heir—she was secure on her throne, a universally admired figure. Though Shakespeare's culture was on the verge of dramatic and violent change, the Sonnets, with their focus on domestic matters, affairs of the heart, seem insulated from that change.
|